The American Consumer Institute has released a collection of essays addressing the likely consequences of “ ‘Net Neutrality” regulation for investment in broadband and for consumer welfare. These are important things to consider, in case it needs saying.

Colleagues and correspondents have kindly shared their understandable discomfort with my conclusion in recent posts that the Fort Hood shooting was nearly impossible to discover in advance, and thus prevent.

The one ray of hope I can offer is that the shooting itself makes such things more foreseeable, putting the military community and investigators on notice prospectively that this kind of thing can happen. No formal policy change can do more than the Fort Hood shooting itself to ferret out inchoate incidents like it in the future. Belief that the Fort Hood shooting was easily preventable, though, is 20/20 hindsight.

I first read How We Know What Just Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life to get a handle on how it became so plausible after the September 11, 2001 attacks that terrorists might next use chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. Recall that their weapons of choice for the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks were box cutters. How did we proceed to the assumption that nuclear terrorism was next?

One explanation is the “representativeness heuristic,” a mental shortcut people use to organize the world around them. “According to this overarching belief, effects should resemble their causes, instances should resemble the categories of which they are members, and, more generally, like belongs with like.” (page 133)

Big causes have big effects, so big effects come from big causes. … Right?

The 9/11 terrorists knocked down the World Trade Center and killed 3,000 people. Driven to match the huge effects of the those attacks to a sufficient cause, our common sense imported skills, knowledge, weapons, and organizational capability that terrorists do not in fact have. (Ongoing pressure worldwide will ensure that remains true.)

As to the 9/11 attacks, the representativeness heuristic lead us astray. I believe a similar mental error is at play in many people’s interpretation of the Fort Hood incident.

Though it’s not true, many maternity room nurses believe that more babies are born during a full moon than at other times. This is because of confirmation bias: They notice babies born during full moons and accumulate proof of the full-moon theory—but they fail to notice babies born at other times.

How We Know What Just Isn’t So has a chapter called “Too Much from Too Little: The Misrepresentation of Incomplete and Unrepresentative Data” that discusses not only the excessive impact of confirmatory information, but also the problem of hidden or absent data. We make many judgments in life without considering all the relevant data.

An extreme instance of this is Fort Hood, about which political leaders and millions of Americans are taking a few data points—one or two things occurring—and concluding from them that all instances of these things result in a shooting or other violence like we saw at Fort Hood. But, as I said with regard to Nidal Hasan’s contacts with a jihadi in Yemen, the relevant data includes thousands of times when such things happen. Because they were offshore communications with a jihadi, investigators appropriately examined the messages and found them lacking signs of intended violence.

The other major indictment is that Hasan’s Islamist rantings should have been a dead giveaway of violence to come. Political correctness drove colleagues to turn a blind eye to Hasan, “permitting” the Fort Hood shooting to happen, this argument maintains.

There probably was some “political correctness” involved. I can think of no community more likely to withhold judgment of others than psychologists and psychiatrists, who are privy to the strange and dangerous thoughts of their patients day after day after day.

Note again the full range of relevant evidence, though: Thousands of times daily across the country, mental health professionals and social workers hear people’s violent thoughts—not just political rantings—which only rarely materialize into violence. In the military, it’s harder to guess at a number, but certainly thousands of times per year, service members discuss violence against other service members and political opinions that are odd or controversial, including Islamist political views. Very rarely—tragically when it does—this results in actual harm to men and women in uniform.

Nidal Hasan may have been fit for expulsion from the military. He may have been kept in by some form of political correctness or opportunistic bureaucratic burden-shifting once it was clear he was leaving Walter Reed for Fort Hood.

But only operation of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy allows the conclusion that his expulsion from the military would have averted the tragedy. Because it followed in time, the shooting appears to be a result of his continued military service or his looming deployment to Afghanistan. But it is not so obvious that his discharge from the service would have caused him to go limp, take a job at a convenience store, and live a happy life.

Had he been pushed out of the military, it’s quite plausible that his resentments would have grown, his contacts with jihadis would have increased, his planning would have been more strategic, and so on. It is simple assumption that expelling Hasan from the military would have averted so many deaths and collective national pain, just like it is simple assumption that it wouldn’t have.

As I discussed in a recent podcast, information always points to what happened next when you look at it after the fact. Data does not point so clearly to any conclusion when you observe it in real time along with all the other then-relevant data.

The Fort Hood shooting was a tragic and regrettable incident, but correctable security failure is not easily shown. The idea that the shooting was predictable is fueled by a small array of common perception problems and errors in logic. These errors have now inspired a hearing in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee later this week. The committee will try to find security lapses and seek after conditions in which “no such attack ever occurs again.”

Politicians can promise the public that every tragedy can be averted, but soldiers know better than most that tragedy and loss do happen. At the memorial service for the Fort Hood victims, Lt. General Cone captured that reality, and the spirit in which we must accept it, saying to victim’s families, “The Fort Hood community shares your sorrow as we move forward together in a spirit of resiliency.”

I wrote on the Tech Liberation Front blog a couple of months ago about the shady practice among a few Internet retailers of handing off customers who accept a “special offer” to a company that charges people a monthly fee for some kind of credit monitoring service. And I argued hopefully that maybe technologists and the Internet community could generate a response to this problem:

Being a smart, informed, and aggressive consumer is each person’s responsibility if a free market is to operate well. The alternative is a negative feedback loop in which government authorities protect us, we rely on that protection and stop policing retailers. Thereby we abandon the field of consumer protection to government authorities, who—try as they might—can never do as good a job for us as we can for ourselves.

The Senate Commerce Committee is having a hearing today on “Aggressive Sales Tactics on the Internet and Their Impact on American Consumers.”

Progress & Freedom Foundation president and Cato alumnus Adam Thierer has done yeoman’s work for years pointing out, and arguing against, the phenomenon of techno-panic as it relates to children. That’s not the only area in which techno-panic can tighten its grip on the neck of common sense and the constitution, of course.

But here’s a delight I ran across this morning: the Los Angeles Times arguing against techno-panic despite the use of Web sites to research and case potential burglary victims (by the “bling ring,” soon to be the subject of a major motion picture).

The Times editorializes:

[T]hieves [did not] have to wait for the invention of Google maps to reconnoiter neighborhoods in search of easily accessible homes. That’s worth remembering if, as we fear, some legislator decides that a law should be passed to prevent Internet surfers from looking at houses they easily could scope out from the sidewalk.… . A law against photographing a home or what occurs outside it in plain sight — or disseminating the images to others — would be overreaching, not to mention unconstitutional.

What a delight—a major newspaper arguing to keep a hot issue in perspective and citing the constitution as a limit on government power! Thank you, L.A. Times.

In the November 6th Washington Post, Petula Dvorak lamented the effect of REAL ID compliance on women who have changed their names. The Department of Homeland Security is about to give out blanket waivers to states across the country who have not complied with REAL ID requirements — again. But some states have been making it harder to get licenses because of the national ID standards they still think are coming.

“I doubt the most notorious terrorists of our time — the Sept. 11 hijackers, Timothy McVeigh — would have been stopped by these new DMV requirements,” Dvorak writes. “All these laws have done is make us more harried, more paranoid and more red-faced than ever.”

Take comfort, college and grad students: No longer need you settle for spending next summer backpacking around Europe having adventures. Instead, apply for a Google Policy Fellowship, and come work on tech policy issues with Jim Harper and myself in scenic Washington, DC.

The extremely competitive ten-week program comes with a $7,000 stipend, and is a chance to do serious policy work on issues like privacy and surveillance, telecommunications regulation, and other things you read about on Slashdot. Applications are due December 28, so get cracking!

Commentary on the Fort Hood incident can be categorized three ways: reaction, response, and rejoinder (commentary on the commentary).

Reactions generally consist of pundits pouring their preconceptions over what is known of the facts. These are the least worthy of our time, and rejoinders like this one from Stephen M. Walt of Harvard University in the Fort Hood section of The Politico’s Arena blog dispense with them well:

Of course [Fort Hood] is being politicized; there is no issue that is immune to exploitation by politicians and media commentators. The problem is that there are an infinite number of “lessons” one can draw from a tragic event like this — the strain on our troops from a foolish war, the impact of hateful ideas from the fringe of a great religion (and most religions have them), the individual demons that drove one individual to a violent and senseless act, etc., — and so no limits to the ways it can be used by irresponsible politicians (is that redundant?) and pundits.

My favorite response—by “response,” I mean careful, productive analysis—was written last year as a general admonition about events like this (which at least has terrorist connotations):

Above all else is the imperative to think beyond the passions of those who are hurt, frightened or angry. Policymakers who become caught up in the short-term goals and spectacle of terrorist attacks relinquish the broader historical perspective and phlegmatic approach that is crucial to the reassertion of state power. Their goal must be to think strategically and avoid falling into the trap of reacting narrowly and directly to the violent initiatives taken by these groups.

That’s Audrey Kurth Cronin, Professor of Strategy at the U.S. National War College in her monograph, Ending Terrorism: Lessons for Defeating al-Qaeda.

But I want to turn to a critique leveled against my recent post, “The Search for Answers in Fort Hood,” which discussed how little Fort Hood positions us to prevent similar incidents in the future. (I hope it was response and not reaction, but readers can judge for themselves.)

A thoughtful Cato colleague emailed me suggesting that there may have been enough indication in Nidal Hasan’s behavior—in particular, correspondence with Anwar al-Awlaki—to stop him before his shooting spree.

There may have been. Current reporting has it that his communications with al-Awlaki were picked up and examined, but because they were about a research paper that he was in fact writing, he was deemed not to merit any further investigation.

This can only be called error with the benefit of hindsight. And it tells us nothing about what might prevent a future attack, which was my subject.

If humans were inert objects, investigators could simply tweak the filter that caused this false negative to occur. They could not only investigate the people who contact known terrorists as they did Nidal Hassan, they could know to disregard claimed academic interests. Poof! The next Nidal Hassan would be thwarted at a small cost to actual researchers.

But future attacks are not like past attacks. Tweaking the filter to eliminate this source of false negatives would simply increase false positives without homing in on the next attacker. Terrorists and terrorist wannabes will change their behavior based on known and imagined measures to thwart them. Nobody’s going to be emailing this al-Awlaki guy for a while.

In “Effective Counterterrorism and the Limited Role of Predictive Data Mining,” IBM distinguished engineer Jeff Jonas and I used examples from medicine to illustrate the problem of false positives when searching for terrorism in large data sets, concluding:

The question is not simply one of medical ethics or Fourth Amendment law but one of resources. The expenditure of resources needed to investigate 3,000,000, 15,000,000, or 30,000,000 fellow citizens is not practical from a budgetary point of view, to say nothing of the risk that millions of innocent people would likely be under the microscope of progressively more invasive surveillance as they were added to suspect lists by successive data-mining operations.

The same problems exist here, where tens of thousands of leads may present themselves to investigators each year. They must balance the likelihood of harm coming to U.S. interests against the rights of U.S. citizens and the costs of investigating all these potential suspects.

Armchair terror warriors may criticize these conclusions a variety of ways, believing that post hoc outrage or limitless grants of money and power to government can produce investigative perfection. (n.b. Getting victim states to dissipate their own money and power is how terrorism does its work.) But none can accurately say based on currently available facts that anyone made an error. Much less can anyone say that we know any better how to prevent essentially random violent incidents like this in the future.